“The hunt is on, my friends!” Antonius declared, climbing atop his speaking dais once more. He held a bloodied sword in his hand and wore a broad smile across his perfect face. “The heretics flee, driven back by the champions of our Liege Lady, and so we must take the fight to them, drive into their lairs, and burn them from existence!”

Only because you let them. Sadea forced a smile on her face and a perfunctory curtsy on her knees as Antonius gestured toward her and the nobles burst into applause.

And he had. The nobles had ceased their slaughter and hung back as the stunned rebel serfs recovered their senses and scurried back in the same direction they’d come, their morale shattered by their leader’s retreat.

Raksha was simply glaring at the former Lord, every angle of his bearing screaming open hostility. She wanted to elbow him in the ribs, like she often did, but he’d just ignore her, like he always did. Besides, she was too tired, and she felt a horrendous migraine creeping up on her.

“Hey, you’re…” he gestured to his face.

“I know.” Turning away, Sadea pressed a torn tablecloth corner to her nose, doing what she could to stem the flow of blood. Her brain-bleed found drainage through her tear ducts as well, sending trails of sticky warmth down the side of her cheeks.

Can’t throw lightning up like that again anytime soon, not unless I don’t have a use for my brain anymore, like a certain somebody. She cast Raksha a withering glare, to which he was utterly oblivious.

The nobles had their gazes riveted on Antonius. The former Lord was really getting into the stride of his speech now. “…into the bowels of our beloved home, infesting the tunnels and chambers upon which our wealth and glory is built! Let us go forth, my friends, and hunt them down.”

He clapped, and a procession of uniformed servants streamed out from a side door, stepped over the gore-slicked ballroom floor, and formed a line before the dais. Each serf held a small disc of black quartz atop a tray lined with velvet.

Sadea whistled as she recognized the discs as psychic trackers. With one of those, a competent sorcerer could locate any quarry that had been marked, and she would bet her last credit or copper coin that the palace was suffused with the appropriate psychic markers.

Antonius confirmed Sadea’s suspicions almost immediately, as he began handing the trackers to the nobles. “Sectors 76 through 98 in the north-eastern quadrant for you, Calvus. And Fabia, my dear, how do Sectors 19 through 29 in the south-western quadrant for you sound?”

The two nobles accepted their assignments eagerly. Several of their fellows clustered around them, chatting and posturing. As Antonius continued distributing the trackers and calling out what could only be location names in Neo-Mizuru, it soon became obvious that the nobles were dividing themselves up into hunting parties.

How many of them would go personally, though, instead of simply sending their household soldiers in their place?

“Why, all of us, my dear Miss Horatius,” Antonius said. Sadea winced inwardly. Thinking aloud was a bad habit, one that she needed to stop. “As I said, we are dreadfully short on troops, due to… the incidents that led to our Liege Lady’s ascension to power and the heretics’ success at thinning the ranks of our soldiers. It falls to us to bring God’s justice unto them.”

“I must have missed that part of your speech, your Excellency,” Sadea said. “It’s been quite a night.”

“So it has, my dear.” Antonius approached, a psychic tracker in his hand. “And it’s far from over. I have reserved this one for the both of you. With it, you can hunt down the mutant champion you both valiantly battled.”

Raksha snatched the disc from the former Lord’s hand, glowering all the while. For a moment, Sadea thought he might actually spit in Antonius’s face. But even the dummy wasn’t that stupid. He tossed the tracker over his shoulder and into Sadea’s frantic grasp.

“Be careful with that, you idiot! What’re we going to do if it breaks? How absolutely stupid are you? Did your mother drop you on the head as a child and then stamp on your face for an hour? Did someone transplant a shit-covered rag into your skull to fill up the empty space there?” she shrieked. Suddenly remembering where she was, she bit off the rest of her rant, forcibly returned a smile to her face, and curtsied once more to Antonius. “Our sincerest gratitude, your Excellency. We will not disappoint you or Great Lady Leona.”

“We both know what she does to those who do disappoint her, Miss Horatius.” Antonius bowed. “For all our sakes, but mostly yours, I wish you the greatest fortune in battle.”

No, not ominous at all. Sadea sighed inwardly.

“Let’s go,” Raksha grunted, turning away before Antonius gave them leave to depart his presence. Sadea aimed a clumsy kick at his ankles, but he was already several strides gone, shoving his way through the assembled nobles.

“Ah, your Excellency,” Sadea curtsied once more. Antonius nodded and waved dismissively, freeing her to turn and stalk after Raksha. The nobles, their ranks parted in the wake of Raksha’s passage, seemed more than happy to keep the path open for Sadea. They smiled and murmured well-wishes as she passed them, but their smiles were predatory and their words empty.

She finally caught up to the martial scientist in the corridor outside the ballroom. It, too, had walls and a floor of marble. Oil paintings punctuated every alternate awning, and thick, velvet hangings dripped from the ceiling, artfully arranged so they did not obscure the light from the dozens of crystal chandeliers in eyeshot.

Raksha was… stripping. Sadea raised an eyebrow and dodged the ectoplasm-encrusted robe that he’d chucked in her direction. His boots clattered onto the floor. Next, his sodden trousers followed suit, with a wet slap of fabric against marble. Several serving maids who’d just turned the corner covered their mouths, giggled, and pointed.

“Didn’t quite expect that, and it’s not like I’m going to turn down an eyeful when it’s offered,” she commented, when Raksha was left in nothing but his loincloth and sword-belt. “Still, time and place, dummy. Time and place.”

His only reply was a baleful glare as he reached for his boots.

“Wait, wait!” Sadea couldn’t hold back the chuckle that had been building in her chest. “You’re going to look way too ridiculous if you go running around in your underwear and boots.”

“No thanks to you,” he grumbled.

Sighing, she reached into her clutch and pulled out the martial scientist’s faded blue traveling robe. It had been laundered, patched, and folded into a neat rectangle. She chucked it at Raksha, who seized it gratefully.

“You had this? I thought I’d left it at that mansion.”

Sadea emptied out the rest of Raksha’s belongings onto the floor and kicked them over to him. “I had a feeling we’d be on the move, so there wasn’t any point in leaving anything with Vermillion. I’m not returning anything he gave me, either. These earrings and bangles are nice, and I’m sure Leona has plenty of jewelry already.”

Raksha wasn’t even listening to her, preoccupied as he was with putting on his clothes. Sadea shook her head as she ran her eyes over the scars that covered his massive frame. Whatever foes had marked his flesh thus had to be formidable, given his ability to regenerate. The latest one was a gray disc over his left ribs, from where he’d been impaled by the mortuary demon.

Unwinding her scarf, Sadea swept off her top and skirt with deft, practiced movements and pitched them into one of her clutch’s compartments. Its spatial enchantment coughed up her bodyglove, boots, and gauntlets. She grinned as she tugged them on, feeling Raksha’s gaze on her bared flesh.

“Fair is fair,” she said, looking him in the eye.

He coughed and shrugged. “Nothing I haven’t seen already.”

“How haven’t you been kicked in the groin repeatedly by every woman in the world by now?”

“We’ve got work to do here, woman. Keep your perversions to yourself.”

“No, no, I don’t think I will. In fact, I’m going to horrify you with them. Make your skin crawl.”

It was only after they’d walked down three hallways, still bickering, that Sadea realized they didn’t really know where they were going at all.

“I thought you were using that thing Antonius gave us!” Raksha grumbled.

“The tracker indicates the direction our prey lies, but there’s all this palace in the way, and every corridor looks the same. How the hell am I supposed to find anything in this gilded shithole?” Sadea glared irritably at the quartz disc in her fist.

“You… ask?” a serving maid replied, walking up to them. Raksha growled and put his hand on his blade, and it took Sadea a moment to realize the reason for his reaction.

It was Rini, supposedly of House Hirai, only now she wasn’t wearing an emerald-studded dress, but a black serving maid’s uniform with an impractically copious amount of lace and a skirt that was much, much shorter than necessary.

“Go away, Yagyu,” Raksha said.

“I would, but then you’d be stuck wandering Antonius’s palace for a week or more.” Rini fluttered her perfectly curled eyelashes and smiled so radiantly that Sadea had to fight down an urge to smack her across the face. “Come along, then. Leona wants to brief you on your mission.”

“Oh, now she wants to brief us.” Sadea frowned. “When she could have done so much earlier and not let us stumble blindly into that absolute mess just now.”

“But where’s the fun in that?” Rini shot back.

“If we knew that something was up with Antonius, then we wouldn’t have allowed ourselves to be used as bait for the mutants just now. Even if we pretended to know nothing, it wouldn’t be more convincing than if we actually were ignorant,” Raksha said. “And if we didn’t survive just now, that just means we would be too weak to carry out whatever plan Leona has cooked up to handle Antonius anyway.”

“That’s too much thinking for you tonight, dummy. Slow down before you hurt yourself,” Sadea snapped.

But Rini’s eyes were alight with genuine approval. “Very nice. Brains and brawn, exactly the type of man I like to… well.”

She actually licked her lips. Sadea wanted to hit her. In the crotch. With a lightning bolt.

“I know how you Yagyu think, that’s all,” Raksha growled, but the spy simply giggled and began walking away, crooking a beckoning finger in her wake.

“Let’s go! We don’t have all night!” she said, a singsong lilt in her voice.

“We don’t have a choice, right?” Raksha sighed.

“No, not really.” Sadea punched her right fist into her left palm, wishing that the latter was Rini’s face instead.